Sandler Hudson Gallery

Gina Gilmour is a North Carolina-born artist who, in her recent paintings, seeks to render suburbia as an emblematic Southern landscape. She freezes moments of loss or tragedy in symbolic tableaux on front lawns, well-groomed lakeshores, and front steps of suburban houses. Her scenes seem alternately trivial and surreal, empty and meaningful. The ambiguity is deliberate: Gilmour wants to juxtapose the hollowness of the everyday with the suddenness of disaster or epiphany. Subtly (and sometimes not-so-subtly) weaving symbols into the paintings, she raises moral themes indirectly, in a visual language that owes something to the Southern literary tradition, in particular to the grotesque symbolic comedy of Flannery O’Connor. Here, however, it is the denizens of the average and well-to-do South rather than its underworld who supply the symbols of the grotesque, of moral decay.